Review Summary: Don't let them in.
If his earlier albums are any indication, Mike Hadreas has spent most of his life running. Years of substance abuse, emotional insecurity, and self-oblivion were channelled into Perfume Genius, his mirror for the darkness. Starkly honest, his music found beauty in the ugly, but it stayed introspective, a whisper of personal torment. His new release,
Too Bright, turns outwards. The new image and broader instrumentation show a cabaret confidence, taking power from pain, but the desperate fragility is still there. The exorcised demons linger at the edges.
The first track would suggest nothing has changed. Quiet piano chords and washing strings coalesce, forming the foundation for Hadreas’ croon. It remains intimate, a ballad built of personal resolve, reminiscent of what has come before. Alone, the song is just an aching protest. In context, it establishes the narrative of the album: ‘I Decline’ revisits the past while looking ahead, a stylistic reprise that rejects ‘The same old line.’ Here, his voice remains vulnerable, compelling, belying the coming changes.
Too Bright rejects more than a presupposed identity: the gentle piano and bare vocals of earlier releases are augmented by broader, creative instrumentation. Heavy synthesis, strings, and horn sections abound, a musical progression to match the philosophical change.
The glam-rock forays are
Too Bright’s central developments. ‘Queen’ subverts the plaintive opening track, starting with an aggressive, gnashing synth. A gliding vocal harmony phases in and out, granting an angelic air. It’s a track obsessed with contradiction: Hadreas’ queen is ‘Cracked, peeling / Ridden with disease’, a ‘rank, ragged’ Adonis wrapped in gold. The choir of each verse is matched by grunts in the chorus, bolstering the juxtaposition. His lyrical self-hatred recurs in ‘My Body’ – ‘I wear [it] / Like a rotted peach’, Hadreas chants, his joyless falsetto hovering over a wraith-like buzz. The imagery of decay may be rooted in the disgust, but on
Too Bright, it becomes as a source of strength.
The energy is not always aggressive. ‘Fool’ opens with snapping fingers before introducing warm horns and vibrant percussion. Yet, this mood falters. The track cuts to an atmospheric reverie, Hadreas’ reverbed vocals layering across synths and strings. The ambience climbs, filling the space in a final expression of catharsis, before falling into silence. In the aftermath, the finger snaps return, and the track reverts to its original state. However, what is left is twisted, subverted. ‘I made your dress / I’m bleeding out’, he sings as the horns enter with greater prominence – if the interlude was an expression of repressed emotion, what follows is the crumbling façade, made less stable by the outburst. ‘Don’t Let Them In’ plays similarly, a piano ballad that loses its composure, introducing flourishes and broader instrumentation, before restoring itself. The mask returns, but it fractures for the pain beneath.
For an album preoccupied with moving forward,
Too Bright is distinctly circular. ‘The same old line’ seen in ‘I Decline’ is echoed in ‘Grid’, this time over a throbbing synth and background screeches. In ‘Queen’, Hadreas boasts ‘No family is safe / When I sashay’, yet, in the glam-rock stride of ‘Longpig’, his own comes into view. ‘We bury meat for mama’, he tells us, an inclusive lyric of filial responsibility, made sinister by the title’s reference to human flesh. ‘I’m A Mother’ adopts the forlorn tone of a funeral dirge, with unintelligible vocals slipping out, a whispered, reverbed falsetto perpetually on the verge of collapse. The production here is at its most ethereal, each line a ghostly waver that eventually devolves into static. When looking outwards,
Too Bright is bold, but with each step closer to home, the delivery becomes less clear. The titular track that follows ‘I’m A Mother’ may ground the album once again, but it doesn’t last. ‘I’m fine’, insists Hadreas, yet the track swells and collapses all the same.
Perhaps the greatest crime awaiting
Too Bright is narrowed politicisation. ‘Don’t you know your queen’, indeed, but the gravitas of the album extends beyond Hadreas’ sexuality. It bleeds, each track weeping, about addiction, about misery, about alienation.
Too Bright offers more than sorrow; it offers fear, and anger, and just when it seems that Hadreas is about to drown under their weight, he spits them back. It finds empowerment in the face of fragility, strength in the face of victimisation, crying out in protest against the narratives, those ‘same old lines’ that are imposed time and time again. His self-reflection is an anthem for the vulnerable looking for an audience. ‘I don’t need you to understand’, he pleads, as the warm Rhodes and light percussion of 'All Along' bring the album to a close. ‘I need you to listen.’
